a history of foreign missions

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A History of Foreign Missions The Spread of Christianity in the Modern World. "Handbooks of Ethics and Religion" by Edward Caldwell Moore Review by: Kenneth Scott Latourette The American Journal of Theology, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Apr., 1920), pp. 306-308 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3155415 . Accessed: 17/05/2014 07:45 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The American Journal of Theology. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 194.29.185.237 on Sat, 17 May 2014 07:45:37 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Page 1: A History of Foreign Missions

A History of Foreign MissionsThe Spread of Christianity in the Modern World. "Handbooks of Ethics and Religion" byEdward Caldwell MooreReview by: Kenneth Scott LatouretteThe American Journal of Theology, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Apr., 1920), pp. 306-308Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3155415 .

Accessed: 17/05/2014 07:45

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to TheAmerican Journal of Theology.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.237 on Sat, 17 May 2014 07:45:37 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: A History of Foreign Missions

306 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY

Two lectures are devoted to a survey of conditions in the Medi- terranean world of Plotinus' day and two others give an account of his forerunners. The cradle of Neoplatonism is found to have been not Athens but Alexandria, where Orientals and Occidentals freely mingled, yet the system of Plotinus is held to have been an almost completely pure revival of Platonism. The suggestion that mystical tendencies cherished by the oriental cults may have contributed features to Neoplatonism is emphatically rejected. Successive chapters deal at length with the characteristic Plotinian notions regarding the world of sense, the soul and its immortality, the intelligible world-or the "spiritual" world, as this writer terms it-the absolute, ethics, reli- gion, and aesthetics.

Dean Inge has accomplished the somewhat unusual feat of writing interestingly about even the most abstruse phases of Neoplatonism. He has also written with abundant knowledge at his command and with a personal interest in his subject that made him capable of appreci- ating many an obscure color that would have escaped a less admiring observer. At the same time his desire to make the third-century Ploti- nus the model exponent of a twentieth-century idealism renders it somewhat difficult for a reader to maintain an undistorted historical

perspective. The value of Plotinus as an interpreter of life's problems in the Mediterranean world of the third century is one thing; his worth as a guide for the solution of the problems of twentieth-century civili- zation in a very different world is quite another matter. This, however, is a distinction which seems never to have been specifically made by Dean Inge. But some such historical discrimination would seem neces-

sary to a scientifically valid estimate of Neoplatonism as a whole and of Plotinus in particular.

SHIRLEY JACKSON CASE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

A HISTORY OF FOREIGN MISSIONS A compact volume by the scholarly president of the American

Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions' represents two interesting and highly significant movements in the field of missions. The first is seen in the form of the work, a handbook which may serve as a text in college or university classes or in more advanced church study groups. That such a book could be published is evidence of a conviction that

IThe Spread of Christianity in the Modern World. "Handbooks of Ethics and Religion." By Edward Caldwell Moore. Chicago: University of. Chicago Press, 1919. xi+352pages. $2.00.

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Page 3: A History of Foreign Missions

A HISTORY OF FOREIGN MISSIONS 307

missions should find a place on the curriculums of our institutions of higher education. It is one more of the indications, of which there are today so many, that Protestant communions are beginning to take seriously the task of bringing the Christian gospel to bear upon the entire world, and that the missionary enterprise, once supported by a comparative few, is today winning increasing recognition from the thoughtful and scholarly leaders of our nation.

The second movement which the book represents is that toward the conception of Christian missions as a process having as part of its goal the transformation by the spirit of Jesus of all phases of the world's life, religious, social, political, economic, and intellectual. The author represents "the prevailing mood of our time" to be "that which esteems that the problem [of missions] is neither to make for another world nor yet to make another world in this, but through men who are being saved to make this another world." He conceives missions as the means for " the gradual embodiment of the spirit of Jesus in the life of mankind." In close consistency with this position Professor Moore treats the mis- sionary enterprise during the past several centuries as an integral part of the expansion of Europe, not divorced from but intimately associated with the touching of the life of non-European peoples and the filling of the comparatively unoccupied quarters of the earth by the energetic races of Europe.

With this point of view, Professor Moore opens his book with a brief account of the growth of Christendom since the time of Christ and the expansion of Modern Europe since the latter part of the fifteenth century, pointing out specifically the relation of the latter movement to the missionary enterprise. He then takes up, country by country, the main areas of the earth, giving in compact summary the story of the invasion of these lands by occidental commerce, races, nations, anrd ideals, and dwelling especially on the missionary enterprise. The book thus constitutes a brief history of modern missions regarded as a part of the impact of occidental peoples and culture upon other lands and as constantly conditioned by that relationship.

Inevitably the story is too big to be told in so brief a compass, except in compact, outline form, and the book accordingly suffers partly by necessary omissions and partly from the scanty mention of so many names. It is obviously, moreover, written from the Protestant stand- point, and while appreciative mention is made of Catholic missions, especially of the period before the nineteenth century, there is but slight attention paid them in the years since the rise of Protestant

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Page 4: A History of Foreign Missions

308 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY

missions. The reader goes away almost uninformed as to the remark- able progress made in non-Christian lands during the past hundred years by missionaries of the Roman church. More attention, too, could well be given to the means by which the church has followed the European settler in the Americas, Africa, and Australia, and has affected his life. The author, moreover, seems not to appreciate the change that was

wrought in Protestantism when it became missionary. In spite of these defects, the book is a most admirable one, and it

is to be hoped that its publication will serve to stimulate in many colleges and universities the introduction of a course on the history of missions.

KENNETH SCOTT LATOURETTE DENISON UNIVERSITY

GRANVILLE, OHIO

THE LEVELLERS

The Leveller Movement has been interpreted in a doctoral dis-

sertation, to which was awarded the Herbert Baxter Adams prize in

European history., The greater part of the material used in its prepara- tion was collected by the writer in the British Museum, and an important contribution is his condensation of the most significant documents, which he has incorporated in the body of the argument. Years have passed in the maturing of the author's conclusions, in the presentation of which he has been remarkably forceful and clear. His skilful use of biographical material has kept this constitutional study from becoming abstruse and dull. Interest is more than sustained; it steadily grows right through to the end. The part played by Lilburne is told with gripping interest. Cromwell comes in for some severe strictures, but not for more than the facts seem to warrant. A noteworthy service to the student of church history is the writer's excellent analysis of Erastianism and

Independency. In the Leveller, the writer discovers a rationalist; an advocate of

the compact theory of government, pronouncing laws valid only in so far as they harmonize with reason and nature; the proponent of a written constitution of fundamental laws, framed under the guidance of the people and enforced like other laws through the courts. These laws, moreover, he maintained, should be simplified. As an idealist he believed citizens though untrained in democracy could safely commit

'The Leveller Movement. By Theodore Calvin Pease. Washington: American Historical Association, igi8. x+4o6 pages.

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